Ender's Lame

  A while back - before I had a blog - I saw the film Ender's Game and wrote a review on it which can also be read at The Author's Files, (and despite what you might read there, my name is most definitely not Phil M. Komen Tory).  I had read the book and loved it, so I had high expectations.  I was, unfortunately, sorely disappointed.  

  Ender Wiggin is a third child in a society where couples are limited to have only two children –incidentally this information is not actually given in the movie despite several allusions to the fact.  He is a social outcast, a situation that is only worsened by the fact that he is also one of Earth’s brightest adolescents and is enrolled in a school that trains children for a future military career.  When Ender’s monitor – a device that allows his teachers to see through his eyes and hear his thoughts, thus aiding them in their evaluation process – is removed, he is tormented by both older children at his school and his older brother at home.  As Ender soon learns, however, this was a merely his final test before entering battle school, where he begins his military training, which takes place in the form of zero gravity battles between the different “armies” of students.  Here he is tormented further by jealous students, and Ender learns that a teacher by the name of Colonel Hyrum Graff is isolating him so as to bring out his full skill and potential.  Graff also introduces Ender to the mind game, a video game designed to mirror the players emotions and feelings, thus aiding the teachers in their evaluation of the cadets.  To reveal much more would be to spoil the entire film for you and so I shall say no more concerning the plot of the movie (not that it’s really worth seeing).

  Before I tear this film apart digital limb by digital limb, I shall focus on one of the few positive aspects of the film, mainly Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford’s acting.  Asa Butterfield does a superb job as Ender, communicating through his expression what mere words cannot.  He also manages to convey surprising amounts of emotion even through his formal, monotone speech.  I was shocked witnessing Butterfield express Ender’s brutal instinct in several different scenes.  Harrison Ford too deserves a sizeable acknowledgement for his part in the film as the strict and heartless Colonel Graff, coming across as uncaring and impatient.  Everyone else, however, is boring, one-dimensional, and utterly devoid of any purpose in the film except to be there.  Ben Kingsley does a decent job as Mazer Rackham, who unfortunately is about as interesting as dirt.  Abigail Breslin does an acceptable job as Valentine, who is equally boring, if not more so, than Mazer.  Viola Davis plays Major Anderson, who acts like your regular damsel in distress despite her rank.  I’m not sure whether I was supposed to think of Petra as a helpless, young girl, a tough battle school veteran, or Ender’s girlfriend.  Bean is an obnoxious twelve year old with an extremely annoying voice –which upon further reflection is shockingly comparable to Justin Bieber’s…  not a pretty thought.  And Bonzo, Peter, and Stilson are your stereotypical bullies, although this is more the fault of the writers than of the actors themselves. 

  Gavin Hood and his crew took what’s probably one of the best books I’ve read and turned it into a poorly executed mishmash of zero gravity battles, pretty CGI scenery, and boring, one-dimensional characters.  While Gavin Hood manages to stick the story in the first ten minutes of the film, Ender’s time at battle school is practically indecipherable from the book, mashing various battles and characters together and erasing certain characters entirely as well as chopping out half the book.  On a similar note, Ender’s brother, Peter, might as well have been written out of the script entirely.  He appears in one scene, in which he is portrayed one-dimensionally as an evil bully who lives but to torment his brother, a picture very dissimilar to the book’s representation.  I was very disappointed to learn that Major Anderson had been cast as a girl… or perhaps it was an allusion to a much darker truth……  Gavin Hood also turned the mind game, which in the book had been a metaphorical parallel to Ender’s emotional and moral development, into a half-explained precognition to a later scene in the film.  Indeed, almost everything in this movie is left unexplained.  Gavin Hood attempts to fit too much into this one hour and forty-five minute film, and as a result, fails to finish most of what he starts.  For example, Ender is referred to as a “Third” as well as several comments that “stopping the buggers was what he was born to do”, and yet never is it explained that couples are permitted only two children in Ender’s time.  Hood also completely writes out chapters eight and nine.  Another pitfall of the short run time is that no one message is properly conveyed.  While Hood hints at several different themes, whether it be friendship, duty, or the internal struggle between good and evil, none is fully expressed and can only be discerned upon extensive reflection.

  The visuals too fell short of my expectations from a film with a hundred and ten million dollar budget.  The spaceship designs for both the humans and buggers are uncreative and unoriginal.  The small, awesome bugger, ah, I mean “Formic”, ships that you see flitting around through the air in the trailer look like tiny Millennium Falcons in reality.  And those large ones?  Well, they just look like the Decepticon invasion ships from Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  The human ships are hardly better.  The large, fighter carriers look like they could come right out of a Halo game, and the fighters themselves look no different from your everyday fighter jet: boring.  The bugger planet is boring and consists entirely of dead wasteland and pointy obsidian rock formations.  The mind game’s graphics are shameful, almost insulting when compared to the highly detailed games of today, and the buggers, when finally revealed in the flesh, are sadly disappointing.  And all the poor graphics are reinforced by the simple cinematography and boring presentation of the film.

  If you have yet to see the disaster that is Ender’s Game, I beg you to read the book instead and spend your time and money elsewhere.  This illiterate atrocity is not worthy of your interest or attention.  Some movies are not worth paying to see in theaters.  Some movies are not worth paying any money for.  There are still more movies which are not worth seeing at all.  Ender's Game is undeniably one of last mentioned kind.

Grade: C-
Ranks somewhere between the ten minutes of Twilight: New Moon that I saw and Mazer Rackham's tattooed face in the movie itself.

Was this really necessary, Mr. Hood?